by Carrie Lofty
She’d thought Joe unfair in making her choose. But there it was. Her choice was flying. She had no claim to him now, and neither of them had reaffirmed their pledges of fidelity. Yet her old ambitions had become so muddled. She still wanted both, but with him back in danger on the front lines, she yearned to take it all back—their fight, her pride.
Hugging her elbows, hunched in on herself, Lulu had never been so uncertain. A hundred times a day she’d wanted to tell him what a mistake she’d made.
I love you, Joe, she imagined writing once more.
But then what?
The picture after that was as blank as a city under blackout. Was she really so incapable of imagining a happy life with him? She used to think that the war limited her ability to create such a picture. After all, until very recently, she’d held out little hope of actually surviving the beastly thing. German victory had seemed so very near while London burned. Curled in her grimy little bunk in Aldwych, she’d expected the roof to collapse with every shuddering bomb blast.
Then, once she had survived, flying had once again become her obsession. It remained her lifeline out of a mire of heartbreak.
Now the tide might be turning. Morale was an unlimited ceiling on a sunny day. Not tomorrow, and maybe not even by Christmas, but peace would come.
If she couldn’t imagine a future with Joe under such buoyant circumstances, then perhaps their notions of happiness were simply too divergent. She couldn’t give up her purpose and pride, not even for Joe.
And he wanted the kind of wife who . . .
She blinked. She sat up. What kind of wife did he want? He’d never mentioned dreams for the future, as if that part of him had been crippled by prison, combat, and the loss of his family. Surely he had a few rattling around in that wounded heart of his. She’d only assumed the rigors of combat would forge his conventional bent into steel. He would yearn for peacetime with a traditional wife at his side. He had said as much in London.
But the weeks since had tempered her stalwart resistance to change. How had they affected Joe? Was there any room in his heart for compromise, as she’d begun to find in hers?
“Bobby, how long till my Lankie’s up?”
The Welshman smoothed his pale mustache and shrugged. “Twenty. Why, you got somewhere to be?”
“Southampton, apparently. Would be nice if I arrived before nightfall. But there’s no telling with your crew.”
“Watch what you say about my fellas, saesnes.”
“Be careful, old boy,” she said with a smile. “When you say ‘Englishwoman’ that way, it sounds like an endearment.”
He smoothed his mustache again. Lulu would’ve sworn he blushed.
After downing the cold tea with a grimace, Lulu searched the hangar until she found a sheet of paper and a pencil. She sat cross-legged in a quiet corner. Looking at the yellowed sheet, she nodded once as if giving herself permission.
The future. Hope was becoming easier to find, easier to nurture and keep afloat. He’d imagined enough to plan on proposing, although that didn’t mean he had considered the details beyond her answer. Perhaps he didn’t know what she wanted, either. She stopped chewing the end of her pencil and began writing.
17 September 1944
Dear Joe,
I’m twenty minutes away from climbing into a Lancaster, bound for Southampton. I only just heard news on the wireless about your latest drop. Everyone’s buzzing with the idea that the war will be over by Christmas. Would that were true! I know you might not believe me, considering all the careless things we said to one another, but I would give anything for the fighting to end. Anything. Even my work with the ATA.
I want to write to you—and this isn’t duty talking, Joe. You know me better than that by now. And I very much want to read your letters in return. I long for news from you. I worry.
Can we forget our last conversation ever happened? Perhaps we can talk about it later, face-to-face, but it’s too thorny to tackle by post.
So, I’ll pretend you’re nodding in complete agreement. There. A little fiction is good for the wartime soul.
Now I’m pretending that the rumors are true, and Jerry will lay down arms by Christmas. What now, Joe? What would you do in peacetime?
Come imagine with me.
Your Lulu
Joe carried her letter through most of Holland, where dikes and narrow roads between elevated fields made Normandy’s claustrophobic hedgerows seem open and free. He kept it in his tunic pocket long after even the most optimistic officers gave up on making Operation Market Garden a success, while he watched, day after day, as his regiment dwindled. That slim piece of paper became his talisman. Some irrational part of him came to believe the zany notion that if he put off answering until the next day, then he’d live to see morning. He couldn’t die with unfinished business.
But of course that wasn’t true. Men in Baker who had children back home to raise—they had unfinished business. Men with fiancées who waited for the day when they’d finally make sacred, heartfelt vows to their devoted sweethearts—they had unfinished business. Hell, every man in the army and the other services besides—they all had the simple unfinished business of living the rest of their lives. They had years of peace and productivity and the strange melancholy of old age. Yet they died anyway.
What now, Joe? What would you do in peacetime?
He needed to reply. And he would, make-believe shield or not, if only he knew the answer. His long-ago dream of a quiet little house, a business of his own, a wife and kids . . . he couldn’t see any of it anymore. Combat had rubbed it out of his mind, like a violent sandstorm across all he’d once known.
Now when Joe dreamed of life after the war, he dreamed of Lulu. No one and nothing else.
What did the details matter?
The Allies left Holland behind. Tails between their legs was hardly how Joe had imagined the operation ending. Overrunning a scattered and retreating German army as they skedaddled over the Rhine—that would’ve been grand. Instead it was the Airborne who retreated. Morale dipped. Hopes of V-E Day showing its bright shining face in 1944 faded.
But Joe was alive. Although a little fuzzy at times as to how he’d survived, he was grateful. His only physical ailment was where he’d accidentally sliced the tip of his left forefinger with scissors while cutting off a wounded man’s jumpsuit. Considering the hellish injuries he’d seen over four weeks in Holland, even losing his hand would’ve been a fair trade for getting out alive.
He was the last to jump off the back of a deuce-and-a-half cargo truck. Then he took his place in the middle of first platoon—always protected on all sides by the men with guns—as they trudged to their new barracks. They were camping outside Sissone in France, forty miles from the Belgian border. Some said it would be for the duration of the winter, but he wouldn’t bet a wooden nickel on that sort of optimism. Although it was only October, a spitting, slicing mix of sleet and rain hit his face, leaving his skin feeling razor burned. He slung his pack over his shoulder, hunched into the wind, and trudged. The 512th might have been Airborne, but they were still infantry. Trudging came with the job.
Beneath the relative shelter of a large white canvas tent, he and the other surviving members of Baker’s first platoon unpacked. Some were from the original days of training back in Georgia, men Joe had known for more than two years. Some were replacements they’d gathered in the weeks after their brief return to England. Those men hadn’t jumped on D-Day, but the stress and rigors of Operation Market Garden had forged them into soldiers.
And to think—the 512th was a relatively young unit. They hadn’t jumped into Sicily and Italy as had more senior regiments of the 82nd Airborne. How some of those grizzled, weary vets were still kicking was beyond Joe’s comprehension.
Despite what they’d endured, the soldiers’ moods were boisterous, probably the most relaxed they’d been since England. Conversations had turned to possible leave time. Pete Tosier, a half-Cajun numbskull and an
excellent sniper, was busy talking up his future exploits in Paris.
“The Moulin Rouge,” he said, “that’s where I’ma go.” His muddied accent sounded, oddly enough, even more bizarre when he pronounced French words, like a Parisian man high on ether. “I’ma get me a new whore every two hours.”
Henry Norton, the scared corporal who’d helped Joe navigate the French countryside on D-Day, had grown up quickly. He was Baker Company’s first sergeant now and had acquired a gruff paternal streak that worked like glue to hold the men together. “Every two hours, Toes? What do you plan on doing in between? Finally learn to read?”
“Nah,” Cpl. Fergus said. “He’ll be praying he can get it up again.”
Freddie Jenkins poked out from his battered copy of Esquire. “Or that the clap don’t make his dick fall off.”
“After that Dutch girl outside Nuenen,” Fergus replied, “he should be prayin’ that now.”
The men laughed as Tosier sputtered his protest. Normally Joe wouldn’t pay their rowdy bluster much mind, but he stretched out on his bunk and laughed along, a cigarette turning to ash between his fingers. He inhaled and closed his eyes, soaking up the tenor of the room. Their jibes and insults took on the cadence of a song, with practiced rhythms and harmonies, leads and accompaniments, as comforting as any lullaby.
Joe had never been as close to the riflemen as they were to one another. They no more wanted to chum around with a medic—his armband a visible reminder of the danger they all faced—than he wanted to know the life stories of fellas who could very well die on him. Their duties were different, too. Riflemen learned to kill, medics to heal. But time and proximity had produced the inevitable camaraderie of men tested in battle. He valued their lives, their individuality, their skills. They’d been through hell and would face it again.
As if a chilly wind had swept down from the north, the mood in the tent shifted. Everyone stopped talking. His interest piqued, Joe pried open scratchy eyelids.
Like kids playing dress-up in their fathers’ uniforms, a batch of replacements stood at the entrance to the tent. They smelled clean. Their skin was unlined, plump with good eats. Wide eyes—eyes unburdened by dark circles—passed over the veterans in the tent. Joe could only imagine what they saw. Refugees from a fate they could only pray to reach. Sinewy caricatures of men. Denizens of hell.
What would it be like to stand on the outside of that toughened unit and look in? Joe remembered seeing the vets of the Sicilian and Italian drops as they’d walked around Leicester, how their posture and their wary, jaded expressions had struck him with both awe and a tingle of fear, like when he’d sliced his finger with scissors. He’d looked down at that fresh wound, knowing it would hurt—not at that moment, with artillery shells blasting their cover behind a half-collapsed dike, with adrenaline numbing his tangled nerves. But soon. Soon it would hurt.
Now the tables were turned and Joe couldn’t find the will to care. These were boys, not men ready to take the place of experienced soldiers. But Baker Company was down to one-third strength, which meant they could hardly be called a company. More like a malformed platoon. They needed fresh troops as much as they needed mortars and morphine.
Joe took a deep drag. They were just kids. He shouldn’t hate the mere sight of them. But he did. These new boys served only one function: cannon fodder. They might as well have come packed in crates like rounds of ammo, except he knew damn well they’d bleed and scream just like men with years more experience. His reluctance to jump in and get to know another batch of future casualties wasn’t surprising.
He looked over their faces, freshly shaven—if they were even old enough to shave. No need to learn names. He wouldn’t remember them anyway, not when his job was piecing their guts together and splinting their legs.
Joe stretched out on his bunk once again and thought of Lulu. No wonder it had taken her so long to come around to his attentions. She’d loved and lost. To open up again was terrifying.
“Is this the tent for Baker Company?” asked one of the boys, a private with Stillman stenciled on his fresh ODs. The others seemed content to let him do the talking, although Joe spotted a few corporals trying to look inconspicuous.
Way to take the lead, fellas.
If the best of Baker had already succumbed to the rigors of battle, what chance did hastily trained replacements have?
“You found us,” said Norton. “Grab a bunk and don’t make trouble.”
Pvt. Shelty, who’d joined them after D-Day, hooked a thumb toward Joe. “Yeah, maybe duck back there with Doc Web.”
Joe sat up and eyed the man. “What’s that supposed to mean, Private?”
Shelty had the good sense to look sheepish. Although Joe liked being able to pull rank—just a little—he was surprised by the kid’s crack. What exactly did these men think of him now? Was he still sticking his neck out, sinking his hands wrist-deep in some poor slob’s intestines, just to haul the word goldbrick through Normandy and Holland?
“It’s just . . .” Shelty swallowed.
Joe lit another cigarette, just to give his hands something to do. “Just what?”
“It’s just, well, you’re real good at not gettin’ shot. You always know when to get low.”
“Yeah,” said another private name Hallowell. “Remember that time outside Nijmegen? You ducked before I heard a damn thing, so I ducked, and whoosh! That .88 went right over our heads. I’da been blown to smithereens if it wasn’t for you.”
Joe remembered but hadn’t realized the incident had left such an impression. It had just seemed right. Get down, his mind had shouted. So that’s what he’d done.
One by one the men in that tent related stories about Joe in combat, stories of what he’d done ever since bandaging McIntosh’s hand back on the rifle range at Rothley. Some of the stories bordered on the bogus and the mythic, inspired by their desire to scare the pants off the replacements, but with every word spoken, Joe relaxed. The affection he heard was a healing balm for the doubts he hadn’t realized he still harbored.
“Don’t listen to them, boys,” he said at last. “It’s easy to keep my head when the Geneva Convention says I’m not a target.”
“Whatever it is, it’s working,” said Sgt. Norton. “Hell, maybe you’re our good luck charm. Baker’s in bad shape, but other companies have fared far worse.” He pointed at the replacements. “You watch the doc real good. When he ducks, for Chrissake, get your head down. You might make it through this thing yet.”
The replacements filed in and set about making themselves at home, their fastidiousness and attention to protocol like the manners of an older generation—familiar, quaint, useless. Joe closed his eyes and listened as the vets returned to their favorite topics: Paris, girls, home, cigarettes, and busting Hitler across the mouth. How could Joe not care for these men? How could he not risk his neck to save them when they needed him the most? They protected him with their rifles; he did what he could when they were wounded. Somewhere across the last few years, that give-and-take had become his purpose and his honor.
They respected him. Joe didn’t want anything else in the world.
Well, Lulu, there’s your answer.
Maybe they would stay for winter. He savored the idea of paring down his duties to the basic tedium of morning sick call: treat for headaches, check for fevers and pass all serious cases to the real docs. Sure there’d be mindless drills and physical training, but what was that other than a bit of exercise? No one would be shooting at them or bombing them or invading their position. No more hoarse, terrified cries for a medic. His mind . . . he could check out.
And he’d go back to Lulu, of course. Back to their lovemaking and their argument. Always back to that little room. He wished he’d been able to find a swanker setting for his thoughts, considering how often he returned there.
Suddenly charged up and restless, Joe rummaged through his gear until he found a piece of paper. When he couldn’t find a pencil, he used the stub of one he
had left in his aid bag.
Don’t think. Just write. So he did.
4 October 1944
Dear Lulu,
Most the time all we have is pretending. Either it’s the hopeful kind, which is probably easier for you to understand. Or it’s the morbid kind like we’re already dead. I can’t explain it any better than that. Depends on the day.
I’ve been thinking about your question. What would I do in peacetime? Until a few minutes ago I honestly didn’t know. Plus it felt like I’d jinx myself if I wrote it down. But I’d rather jinx myself than go without telling you. That way if the worst happens—well, you know me. I need someone to know me.
I want respect. That’s all. It’s probably too simple of an answer for you. You want to know what I’d do or where I’d live. Maybe I’ll go back to my apprenticeship as a mechanic. Believe it or not—fixing a leaky radiator has a lot in common with clamping a sliced artery. Engines would be a nice change of pace from patching up people. Maybe I’d go out west and start over someplace where they don’t know me from my Plainfield days.
But I’m not sure if all that’s important to me. These men respect me in a way that I’ve never had. I want a wife I can love, kids I can help raise to be good people, and the kind of character that folks talk about while wearing smiles. I’ve been the other kind and it wears away at my guts.
Your turn.
Joe
After addressing the letter to White Waltham, he braved the rain to find the makeshift PX. He handed it to the censor before he changed his mind, trying to ignore the fact that another man would read what he’d just ripped out of his heart and put on paper.